FACE TO FACE: challenging traditional portraiture
FACE TO FACE: challenging traditional portraiture
Dewey Family Gallery
October 4, 2008 - May 17, 2009
Portraiture has long been considered an objective representation of the sitter, a truthful “likeness”—whether emotional or physical—that captures the essence of the subject. However, this exhibition, drawn from DeCordova’s Permanent Collection, challenges our conventional understanding of portraiture by asking us to reevaluate the complexity of the genre and, by extension, representation itself.
The adjacent diptych, Two Man Show/Three Women by Dick Lebowitz and Tom 
Young, served as an inspiration for this exhibition. Young and Lebowitz place the photographer in the composition, revealing the artistic process and unhinging the conception of portraiture as an objective record. Even the title of the work suggests that the artist is just as much a part of the portrait as the sitter.
Two Man Show demonstrates only one of the many methods artists in the exhibition employ to challenge our common conceptions about portraiture. In Untitled, Contact Sheet Self-Portrait, Karl Baden violates the singular “I” by physically fragmenting his own body. Multiple mouths and eyes suggest that the human subject is a composite rather than a finite whole. Other images in the exhibition focus on figures dressed in various guises, highlighting the constructed nature of identity. Some hardly seem to be portraits, in the traditional sense, at all.
Together these various strategies challenge our preconceptions about portraiture and raise the question of whether a portrait can exist independently from the specifics of time and place. The images in the exhibition bring us face-to-face with our own multiplicity and identity negotiations to ultimately expose the limits of portraiture and representation.
Face to Face was organized by Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik.
Image: Dick Lebowitz and Tom Young, Two Man Show/Three Women from the “Silver Bullet Gallery Portfolio”, 1982, silver gelatin print, 11 x 14”, Gift of Arlette and Gus Kayafas and Museum Purchase
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